'I realized that this was going to be dangerous for me.' Oshkosh locals humanize racism

Mushe Subulwa shares how his experiences and culture shape his parenting of his two young sons.
Devi Shastri

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Mushe Subulwa helps his sons Mooka, 7, and Mwakamui, 3, sort beads Saturday, April 7, 2018, at their Oshkosh home. Subulwa, who immigrated to the U.S. from Zambia 20 years ago, was one of the subjects in the FIT Oshkosh photo project. Subulwa, his wife, Ang, and their two children Mooka, 7, and Mwakamui, 3, live in Oshkosh. The photo exhibit, “Color-Brave Photo Project: Black and Brown Faces, a New Narrative,” celebrates the lives of people of color in the Fox Valley. It will be on display April 20-25 in the Carriage House at the Paine Art Center and Gardens in Oshkosh.(Photo: Joe Sienkiewicz/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)Buy Photo

OSHKOSH – On a lazy, quiet Sunday in 2008, Mushe Subulwa stood on the front porch of his new home on Oshkosh’s northwest side.

Subulwa and his wife, Ang, had just moved to the city the Wednesday before. He was still tired from the move but decided to take a moment to call his mom in Zambia to tell her the move had gone well and they were settled in.

He still doesn’t know for sure why what happened next happened.

Maybe it was because he was pacing as he spoke. Maybe it was because he wasn’t speaking English.

Only one theory made sense to him, and it became painfully clear as he watched three police cars speedily converge on his home.

Maybe it was the color of his skin.

A decade later, Subulwa sat at his kitchen table on a Sunday not unlike his first one in town, recalling the moments that followed. The police stepped quickly out of their cars, their hands hovering near their waists as they yelled repeatedly that he put his phone down, he said. Subulwa froze.

“I realized that this was going to be dangerous for me,” he said. “So I dropped my phone. I mean, it was in my hands, I just dropped it down and started to listen to what they were saying.”

He was on his phone outside his door, he responded, refusing to provide ID. He hadn’t done anything wrong. The back and forth continued until Ang, hearing raised voices on the porch, stepped outside. The tension immediately diffused, the couple said, and Ang, having corroborated her husband’s legitimacy, asked again why the police were there.

They’d gotten a call from a resident worried about a suspicious person in the neighborhood.

It was the first time since moving to Wisconsin that Subulwa’s blackness would label him as a potential threat.

It was not the last, he said.

In 2013, the couple moved to their current home on Oshkosh’s east side. It happened again. Once, someone called to complain that he and his black friends were working on fixing a car in his driveway. That time, an officer drove out to inform Subulwa that he’d done nothing wrong. He’s heard an elderly woman call his now-3 and 7-year-old sons “n---- kids” who might steal their friends’ bikes.

“I remember when I was a kid, back home in the village, we woke up in the morning and my mother would say, ‘We’ve seen footprints of a lion,’” Subulwa said. “Everybody would be on alert because that’s a dangerous animal that has passed. Everyone would be on alert. But what I realized in Oshkosh, just because a neighbor called that there is a black guy — it was like an Amber alert.”

He’s seen attitudes around race change over time. Many who initially treated him differently at work trust him fully today. Individuals are educating themselves and engaging in conversations, too. He and others in the immigrant community have met with local representatives, city leaders and police administrators.

He and Ang founded SEPO Zambia, a program to foster connections between America and Zambia in order to encourage education, sustainability and mutual growth. The number of immigrant families in the city has grown, and as a leader in the community, Subulwa personally welcomes and helps any new immigrant family that moved into Oshkosh over the decade.

The aim is not to speak for all black people, Subulwa said. His experiences, especially given his job, are his own, as are his opinions.

But progress in Oshkosh still feels piecemeal, he said, in that individual people of color earn acceptance on a case-by-case basis. It’s the persistent, systemic biases and stereotypes that worry him most, he said.

“As a man of color, every day I walk out of my door here, I do not know if I am going to come back. I say this because of the things I’ve experienced every day here,” he said. “When a black man walks out of their door, every day, they are vulnerable to everything.”

Local stories take the stage

Subulwa is one of 20 local people of color whose story and portrait are featured in FIT Oshkosh’s exhibit, “Color-Brave Photo Project: Black and Brown Faces, a New Narrative.” FIT Oshkosh is a nonprofit that seeks to promote social change and racial literacy and equity through conversations, education, advocacy, and research.

Over months, Tracey Robertson, FIT’s founder and director, worked with academics from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh to interview subjects about their experiences living in Oshkosh. The stories shared will also be preserved in a forthcoming book.

“The narrative is that people come here for the prison or from the poor communities (in Milwaukee and Chicago),” Robertson said. “We talk about wanting to be diverse, yet this stuff still happens. We’re hoping to bridge that gap to show that (people of color) are complex and the reasons we go anywhere are complex. We hope to shift that narrative.”

Each location will also host a community conversation, where the humanities experts and FIT facilitators will lead a discussion on the exhibit and the audience’s takeaways.

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Photographer Colleen Bies sets up a photo of her father Thursday, April 19, 2018, for FIT Oshkosh’s “Color-Brave Photo Project: Black and Brown Faces, a New Narrative.” The photo exhibit celebrates the lives of people of color in the Fox Valley. It will be on display April 20-25 in the Carriage House at the Paine Art Center and Gardens in Oshkosh.(Photo: Joe Sienkiewicz/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)

A grant from the Wisconsin Humanities Council funds the project, with added support from the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation, The Paine Art Center and Gardens, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, First Congregational Church, The Draw, Ebony Vision Inc., Marion University and ESTHER of the Fox Valley.

The stories in the project serve two purposes: to show that people of color do not all have the same experiences and to raise awareness about common stereotypes and barriers they face.

“I hope it does bring that awareness,” Robertson said. “Mushe isn’t alone, he’s just brave enough to talk about it.”

Susan Rensing, associate professor women’s and gender studies and African-American history at UWO, noted several over-arching themes in the interviews she conducted.

One was a sense of an insular attitude — that not being “from here” is an automatic count against a person.

“When people consider whether Oshkosh is a welcoming community — sometimes it is and sometimes it’s not,” she said.

A positive theme was the idea that people love the city as a place to live, establish a business and more. The potential for growth and success attracts people from various backgrounds.

“There are a lot of ways in which Oshkosh has been a good home for people,” Rensing said. “But then these lines of difference get in the way.”

Carmen Leal, another profile subject, agreed. In moving to Oshkosh from Hawaii a year ago, she described experiencing a larger cultural divide than a racial one. The food is more fatty and has less spice. The people are friendly but reserved. She loves that people here have deep roots — in their community and their families.

“What I’ve seen is most people aren’t bothered about race; they’re just trying to make their way through life,” she said. “It’s just a non-issue for most people because most people don’t go beyond their little circle.”

Leal, 63, came to Oshkosh to be near her family and for a simpler life following a major car crash left her with long-term health issues. She joined a book club and a choir. She’s never been discriminated against in Oshkosh because of race, she said. She also enjoys looking for chances to invest in the community.

She said the best way to make Oshkosh more welcoming to people of color is the same as efforts to attract anyone to the city: better branding. If people know about the affordability and potential of the city, they’ll come flocking.

“There are a lot of great things happening in this area. I just feel when people say, ‘You bring diversity in with good jobs,’ that’s not enough. Because it’s hard to find people for the jobs that are good, whether they’re white or black or whatever. You’ve got to find them, and you’re not going to find them if you can’t offer them good schools and someplace to live that’s affordable and safe.”

She traveled a lot in her life, experiencing different communities and cultures. As a result, she emphasized the importance of breaking out of the “Oshkosh bubble.” Where there are new people, there will be growth, she said.

“I just hope that people realize that there are individuals in Oshkosh that didn’t grow up here that they need to get to know,” she said. “They need to be aware — you know, I grew up in a neighborhood where you just left and you were on your bike all day. You played and you played hard. There was always somebody else’s momma to feed you, love you and beat you. … We don't have that here.

“I wish that people would recognize through these 20 faces and 20 stories that that’s just the drop of the bucket and all these unique people are here for different reasons. And even though they don’t go to school with you and they’re not family — get to know them.”

A chance to grow

One such subject, Angie Lee, is herself a FIT Oshkosh volunteer.

Lee “is” a lot of things: She’s a teacher, a wife and mother, a Korean-American.

Not one for the spotlight, Lee was hesitant about participating, but she came around to the idea.

“I thought it’s be a great opportunity to lend my voice, especially because when I moved here, I did experience racism — explicit racism and implicit racism,” she said. “I feel very committed to this community knowing that my children will grow up here I want to do something to impact it in a positive way.”

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The photo exhibit celebrating the lives of People of Color in the Fox Valley area. Color-Brave Photo Project: Black and Brown Faces, a New Narrative, will be on display in the Carriage House at the Paine Art Center and Gardens.
Joe Sienkiewicz/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

There are plenty of things Lee likes about living in Oshkosh: The cost of living is affordable. It’s a great place to raise a family. The people are mostly kind and neighborly in that Midwestern way. There’s a lot of positive momentum and big conversations about diversity, acceptance and more. The vast majority of her experiences since moving here have been positive.

But there were challenges, too. The well-meaning co-worker who used the word “Oriental” and said her kids looked like “China doll babies.” The stranger who insisted they can guess her ethnic background from the shape of her face. The kid in her class who saw her and sang, “ching-chong, ching-chong.”

“It still hurts, but I’m also at a point where I can look past it and use those things as teaching opportunities,” she said.

Lee moved to Oshkosh three years ago from the suburbs of Chicago when her husband got a job at UWO. She remembers the culture shock that came with the move to a predominantly white city, laughing that she’d gone to the farmers market and joked that she’d lose her husband, who is white, in the crowd. She’s still not entirely used the lack of diversity — she notices it when she goes to the grocery store. She notices it at school in Neenah, where she’s one of two Asian teachers. The rest were white.

She said it’s important that young children see people who look like them in the media and in the community.

“I think it’s incredibly important for my children to see someone and see their culture and their experiences reflected in them,” she said. “You can build community in a lot of different ways, and one familiar way is through people having a shared background.”

When she thinks about that feeling that comes with being one of the few, if not the only, person in the room that looks like her, she notes the presence of a very human emotion.

“Being here, we’ve met an incredible community of people, but I’ve felt lonely at times,” she said. “Not because I didn’t have anyone to hang out with or not because I couldn’t arrange a playdate. Nothing like that, but because I didn’t have someone that had the same upbringing as me. … I think people that I’ve met here were incredible and I can share stories and I can try to explain my perspective, but, you know, that can only go so deep.”

A possible area from growth in Oshkosh could come from having a wider range of offerings that let people engage with different cultures in a fun and engaging way — through the arts and ethnic restaurants. She and her family still go to Chicago or Milwaukee if they’re craving ethnic food.

And, of course, there are projects like this one. She hopes that the collective power of the featured stories will help people of all backgrounds identify better with one another.

“I think (telling these stories) really personalizes racism. I’m going to assume that most people generally know that racism is a problem in our country. But when you put a face to it, when you put a specific story of something that happened in Oshkosh, it makes it very personal. It makes it very real. And then we have to confront it and we have to work through it.”

If you go

FIT Oshkosh's Color Brave Photo Project traveling exhibit will be at the following locations in the Fox Valley through Oct. 3. For a more detailed schedule, including a list of community conversations, visit FIT's website, fitoshkoshinc.org.